Exercise daily. Star in your own sitcom. Visit the Great Pyramids. Run a marathon. Go hand-gliding. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway. Climb K2. Attend the Winter Olympics...Shoot...Compete in the Winter Olympics!

Goals. They can be our rudder out in the high seas of life that give us purpose and direction.

For the ones that don’t ever get accomplished the reasons vary but for a lot of us the reason for the missed goal is as simple as, “life just gets in the way”. We get distracted with other tasks that seemed more pressing - and even more interesting.

One of the perennial goal making exercises we all go through is the New Year’s resolution...Do you even recall what your New Year’s resolution was this year??? Notice I said was and not is. That was intentional. :) So many things come up over time that these things just get buried until we finally forget them completely. Harmless usually. They're usually fun things we'd like to start or stop doing.

All well and good if these are personal goals but what about your work-related goals? Suddenly, it is much more important that they get accomplished. That’s for certain. Even more importantly, how are these work-related goals measured so you and others can track your progress? (Are they even measured?) Well, I’m sure they’re being measured and monitored in some capacity which may be fine for you as the individual employee but how good is that for the organization if the company has little or no visibility into what your measurements are and how these measurements role up to support achieving the top-line corporate goals?

In a time where companies and ‘the Street’ are so margin conscious in expecting more to be accomplished with less resources, purposeful action by the workforce has never been more important. Ensuring a productive workforce operating efficiently is critical to survive and succeed in today’s marketplace.

I've seen many organizations successfully and unsuccessfully deploy this Strategy Execution business practice. When done right, a Strategy Execution Framework can do many performance enhancing things to improve a company's bottom line. This Framework has a foundation built around using a collaboratively defined set of KPIs for each individual employee. In this framework, these KPIs as displayed in a scorecard tool are collectively 'networked' and aligned to the rest of the workforce’s scorecards which can all be aggregated together showing a direct causal tie to the company’s top-line goals.

Said differently, whatever the top-line strategy is, the contributing components, i.e. sales, marketing, services, finance, product development, etc. including the individuals within those contributing components, have a common framework in place to ensure the organization is marching along to the beat of the same drummer and not playing their own songs as they see fit. Without this framework the company loses valuable horsepower through reduced productivity because the workforce isn't aligned and fully accountable for meeting enterprise strategy-supporting targets. As a result, you’ll have employees doing what they think are the right things without any accountability and inherent strategy alignment. Worse, what happens as the enterprise strategy changes? How quickly is your organization able to realign itself to course-correct the direction of the ship so it’s headed towards the new target??? What are the consequences if your competitors are adjusting more quickly to these changes?

Well, hopefully the reasons for getting started on this initiative are clear. Still, it's surprising that there are not many companies responding to the need for greater accountability, sharper alignment, and more nimble adaptability of its most important resource, its workforce.

So, what are some tips for getting started with this initiative? Well, there are some clear must-haves when starting a project like this including getting C-level executive sponsorship. Without it, you'll fail. This initiative spans the entire enterprise and you'll need someone sponsoring it that has that kind of gravitas to make it happen when others don't want it to happen. Another critical gotta-have-it-in-place is that there needs to be an owner of the overall “Strategy Execution Framework” initiative. This individual needs to not only be a project leader but also needs the intellect to be able to translate what these KPIs are going to be as derived from the top-level strategy. This translation will be required rom the enterprise- to the individual contributor-level across all functions and roles and outline where the cross-functional alignment is for those 'shared' metrics where multiple functions and/or individuals are necessary to achieving the result. Please know that this is no small chore and, as a result, without this leadership in place companies will continue to struggle deploying an enterprise-wide Strategy Execution Framework. In my opinion, until companies start adopting this type of "management" and "measurement" methodology they will have workforce productivity struggles whereby their workforce will be end up loosely focused on the "right" things and, worse, as the enterprise strategy changes, they'll be slow to adjust...even more worse will be if it's slower than their competition. This Framework through the use of integrated scorecards provides executives, functional leaders, and managers visibility into the actual versus the targets to assess how the individual, the function, and the company is performing to better anticipate potential shortfalls while allowing for greater adaptability as these early warning signs appear.

Perhaps if we all implemented more personal scorecards for accomplishing our New Year’s resolutions we might have a higher success rate at that too but that's for another time.

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